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Two days after President Obama unveiled a sweeping plan to address the threat of climate change, more than 50 companies have offered their support for the President’s national climate change strategy, including statements from several CEOs.

Many firms have responded to the new climate paradigm by limiting their impact. But without a national strategy on climate change, even these efforts aren’t enough to address the underlying cause of a changing climate.

In the farming country of northwest Alberta, heavy oil wells are becoming more common than cattle and combines. Along with money and jobs, the boom has brought smells and fumes that are adding to the greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s oil sands.

Helen Keller said, "The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." Her words were on my mind during a workshop at Ford Motor Company’s headquarters where Ford brought together some of its executives with outside stakeholders, kicking off a year-long effort to deepen its water strategy.

Sustainability advocacy organization Ceres held its annual conference in San Francisco last week, and it was full of thought-provoking presentations and conversations about sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) opportunities and challenges.

Currently, more than 100 sustainability ratings, ranking and indices evaluate the performance of more than 10,000 companies, using more than 2,000 different indicators. The idea that this cacophony could be harmonized has long been an unattainable dream for companies.

The rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing to retrieve once-inaccessible reservoirs of oil and gas could put pressure on already-stressed water resources from the suburbs of Fort Worth to western Colorado.

A new Ceres research paper on water use in hydraulic fracturing operations shows that a significant portion of this activity is happening in water stressed regions of the United States, most prominently Texas and Colorado, which are both in the midst of prolonged drought conditions.

Phil Angelides has been awarded the fifth-annual Joan Bavaria Award for Building Sustainability into the Capital Markets. The announcement was made today, the first day of the annual Ceres Conference, which is running May 1-2 at The Fairmont in San Francisco, CA.

The oil industry hasn’t responded with sufficient reforms or adequate disclosure to prevent another Macondo. Ten of the world’s largest oil and gas companies failed to adequately disclose the risks in their deepwater drilling activities in filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Automakers, and especially Detroit’s Big Three, will see greater sales and profits from stronger federal fuel economy standards. That’s what a recent report by Citi Investment Research in collaboration with Ceres found.

The new documentary “Last Call at the Oasis” does far more than recount the alarming woes of our country’s most water-stressed regions; it’s a beautifully produced, detailed picture of an immense global crisis bearing down on us as we speak – and thankfully a roadmap of sorts to what we can do about it.